NASA Chief Values Efficiency / `Cheaper, better' missions his goal

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Published
4:00 am PDT, Saturday, September 20, 1997

The complex and hugely expensive Cassini mission to Saturn, now poised on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral with its plutonium-fueled power plant aboard, will be the last space venture of its kind, NASA chief Daniel Goldin declared yesterday in San Francisco.

"It's the last ship out of port," Goldin said as he reviewed plans for a much more cost-conscious space program.

Goldin was in the Bay Area speaking to school groups and conferring with space scientists at Stanford before attending today's public open house at the Ames Research Center.

CHEAPER MISSIONS

In an interview with The Chronicle, he said future missions will be far cheaper and require far less electric power for their instruments, even as they head for the most distant planets of the solar system where sunlight is too dim to power solar cells.

The six-ton Cassini spacecraft will cost $3.4 billion. Scheduled for launch next month, it will take seven years to reach Saturn, where it will study the giant planet's rings in greater detail than ever before and send a probe parachuting down to the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan.

Power for the spacecraft's dozen instruments will come from three small, on-board generators that convert the radioactive heat of plutonium into electricity. The 72.3-pound load of plutonium in the generators has aroused protests from anti-nuclear activists around the country, who are calling for cancellation of the Cassini flight.

A launch date is tentatively set for October 13 to 15; President Clinton's approval is expected within the coming week.

NOT GOLDIN'S CHOICE

"Let me be very clear," Goldin said. "I didn't want it in the first place."

Although he is confident that the risks of an accidental release of Cassini's highly toxic plutonium are extremely remote -- either in a launch pad explosion or an unintended re-entry of the spacecraft -- and that the mission is as safe as rigorous planning and testing can make it, it's the complexity and cost of the mission that bother Goldin most.

"Faster, better, cheaper," are the words he has used to describe the kind of space missions he has demanded. And the $250 million Mars Pathfinder spacecraft that landed flawlessly on the Red Planet last July, with its tiny rover still efficiently sampling rocks around the landing site, is a perfect example.

A spacecraft called Mars Observer, launched in 1992, vanished in space just as it was approaching the planet the following year. The failed mission cost $1 billion.

"For the price of Mars Observer, we can send five ships to Mars now," Goldin said.

COMMITMENT TO CASSINI

As for Cassini, Goldin is firmly committed to it -- because of its scientific importance and because the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency are full partners with NASA and have paid nearly $1 billion toward its cost. "We've made a commitment to the Europeans," Goldin said, "and I believe America's word has to count for something."

An electrical engineer born and bred in New York City, Goldin was a longtime tough boss in the aerospace industry's TRW Inc. before President George Bush named him as a nonpolitical head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1992.

Today, he said, his eyes are on future missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system and into interstellar space.

Pluto, the most distant of all the planets, is the only one that no spacecraft has yet reached, and to explore it will require major breakthroughs to supply electric power for its instruments, Goldin noted.

That power can only come from nuclear sources, he said. He has already ordered scientists at the Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop tiny, high-efficiency plutonium-powered devices, plus advanced computer chips carrying all the preprogrammed instructions that the spacecrafts will require once they reach their distant goals.